Greg Sandoval of CNET has an interesting blog today about how Hollywood is on the verge of collapse. The reason: digital piracy.

Sigh.

We already went through this with the music industry, do we really need to go through this again? Your sales are slowing… so you have to blame the customer? What business on earth has ever managed to survive on a strategy like that?

Sandoval cites Surfthechannel as an example of one of the sources for pirated content that viewers are flocking to. I heard about the site a few months ago, and managed to get really excited for all of 5 minutes. The breadth of content available is fantastic, but when I tried to watch something, I got redirected to a website that threw up pop-up ads. The video quality was sub-par at best, and the audio not syncing correctly with the video made it damn near unwatchable.

Watching something on Hulu, by comparison, is better and easier than watching the same thing on television. Its success has shown that people will choose legitimate ways of obtaining content if it provides the level of consumer experience that they are expecting.

So instead of blaming your customers, why not just give them what they want?

Photo by el clinto.